The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers

by Richard Mcgregor

  By the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, Mao was a dead tiger of sorts as well. He had withered, physically and politically, and died later that year. But his spirit has endured. No major set-piece speech by a top Chinese leader today is complete without an obligatory reference to the enduring importance of ‘Mao Zedong thought’. Mao’s soft, fleshy visage, with its Mona Lisa-like ambivalence, still hangs in pride of place over the entrance to the Forbidden City in the capital. Opposite, his body lies in a crystal coffin in a mausoleum in Tiananmen Square, ‘so the masses can look on with reverence’. To ensure that his corpse remains in good condition, the Mao Zedong Mausoleum Management Bureau holds regular symposia to study the science of body preservation.

  When China introduced new banknotes in 2001, the fifth set since the 1949 revolution, Mao’s face alone adorned every note above one renminbi (worth 0.14 cents). Other former leaders and the farmers and workers who had been displayed in proletarian splendour on previous notes were removed. No public explanation for the change was advanced at the time, but Deng Wei, a painter who helped design previous generations of banknotes, said in an interview it was to ‘conform with the international practice’ of having a single person on banknotes. That logic left the designers with a single choice–Mao–to represent modern China.

  The Party took years to find a way to repudiate the insanity and murderousness of Mao’s rule without signing its own death warrant. After a year-long internal debate, involving, Li says, 4,000 officials, the Party announced its verdict in 1981 in a party resolution. It decreed that Mao had made ‘gross mistakes’, but concluded that overall ‘his merits were primary and his errors were secondary’. Li was baffled that anyone could think that the deaths of tens of millions of people could be neatly packed away. ‘Aren’t these terrifying numbers? Have we gained a clear picture of what these numbers mean?’ he asks. ‘If we cannot get a clear perspective on past history, we will not be able to improve society, but the propaganda ministry is still trying to cover up these crimes.’

  Although the Party did not include it explicitly in its resolution on Mao’s career, it informally gave it a mark, as you might when grading a student. This grading, often quoted in China, says Mao was ‘70 per cent good, 30 per cent bad’. The debate and the ruling, which was managed by Deng, who became leader in 1978, still stands as the final word on Mao in all public discourse. ‘Unlike the Stalin cult, we are dealing with a man who is Stalin, Lenin and Marx,’ says Geremie Barmé. ‘Deng thought–if we get rid of him, we will open [the Party] up, not today, not tomorrow, but eventually, to a complete negation of the whole system by some radical thinkers.’

  In school textbooks, the Party still polices Mao’s image as zealously as it scrutinizes what Japanese children are taught in Japan about the invasion of China by Imperial Japan. In Shanghai, a team of academics led by Professor Su Zhiliang of Shanghai Normal University struggled for years to force a more honest reckoning of Mao’s rule. ‘Take the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution for example,’ Su told me when I interviewed him in 2004. ‘Our practice in the past was to make [the period] vague rather than clear. But in our most recent edition [of the school textbook], a thorough denunciation is made of Mao’s decision to launch these campaigns.’ The previous textbook had ascribed the Cultural Revolution to Mao’s ‘wrong idea that a large proportion of [the Party’s] power had been snatched by capitalists’. The new version said ‘individual cults and autocratic leadership’ were partly behind the campaign. ‘China’s reform took the route of “economy first, politics second”,’ Su said. ‘We are trying to make history objective by replacing the groundless conclusions with factual descriptions.’

  When the New York Times published an article in 2006 highlighting the absence of Mao from newly issued world history textbooks used for a single year of high school in Shanghai, a huge furore erupted. Mao, along with conventional historical accounts of war and revolution, had been supplanted by texts focusing on issues such as culture, economics, transport and eating habits, an alternative form of historical narrative favoured by some teaching streams in the west. The paper’s provocative headline–‘Where’s Mao?’–prompted furious commentary on the internet. Lieutenant-General Li Jijun, a powerful two-star general and former director of the Central Military Commission, told Xinhua the attempt to play down revolution and ideology was ‘absurd’. Other commentaries on the internet compared the changes to a ‘coup d’état by stealth’ and the start of an ‘orange revolution’ in China. Su protested vainly that social history embodied a proper ‘Marxist view of civilization’, by focusing on social trends rather than single leaders. Years in the making, the entire set of new textbooks was withdrawn by the authorities in Shanghai. Before the controversy, Su was frank about the limits imposed on him. ‘History textbooks are a public interpretation of the country’s political will,’ he said in the 2004 interview. ‘Editors are therefore like birds dancing in a cage.’

  Textbook editors are not the only ones encircled by the Mao myth. Mao’s successors must also pay obeisance to their predecessor. On the one hundred and tenth anniversary of Mao’s birth late in December 2004, Hu Jintao donned a Mao suit to praise the Great Helmsman in a series of ceremonies. As is usual on such occasions, scores of Mao’s books and poems were published. In a twenty-first-century touch, a rap song was also composed for the occasion. But the 2004 anniversary was different in one important respect: a group of six writers and exiled dissidents published a daring letter, entitled ‘An Appeal for the Removal of the Corpse of Mao Zedong from Beijing’. One passage declared:

  Mao instilled in people’s minds a philosophy of cruel struggle and revolutionary superstition. Hatred took the place of love and tolerance; the barbarism of ‘It is right to rebel!’ became the substitute for rationality and love of peace. It elevated and sanctified the view that relations between human beings are best characterized as those between wolves.

  The letter concluded with an appeal for Mao’s body to be buried in Shaoshan, Mao’s hometown, in Hunan, ‘to mark the start of a process of alleviating the sense of national grievance and violence prevalent in Chinese society’.

  When I met one of the authors, Yu Jie, in a Beijing hotel complex, he suggested we abandon our initial rendezvous, at a table in an open-plan restaurant, and find a private room. It was not so much the surveillance that might come with meeting a foreign journalist that worried him. It was talking critically about Mao aloud in public. The last time he had done so in a restaurant, a patron at an adjoining table had stood up and screamed ‘You liar!’ at him. ‘In private, we can talk about these things openly,’ he says. ‘But in public and the media, we can’t.’

  Yu, who hails from Sichuan in China’s west, is no firebrand in the flesh. Mild and bespectacled, he spoke softly about why he helped organize the letter. ‘It wasn’t a radical thing to do. I am just telling the basic truth.’ But Yu was being disingenuous. In the Party, telling the bald truth about history is about the most radical thing you can do. Yu argues that Mao’s brutality has poisoned not just China’s political culture but everyday language. All social movements become ‘campaigns’, he says. Every rivalry is turned into a ‘war’. You don’t just best your opponents in any dispute, you ‘eradicate’ them. In this way, Mao amplified and entrenched the worst qualities of Chinese tradition and society. ‘In Chinese traditional culture,’ he says, ‘the winner is the king and the losers are all rascals.’ While the Mao letter garnered some publicity overseas, in China itself it circulated briefly on the internet before sites featuring it were blocked. When Yu was interviewed on the phone by the BBC’s Chinese-language service about the letter, the line went dead soon after he started answering questions.

  The response of the guardians of establishment history to the litany of Mao’s horrors is as instructive as it is surreal. According to Xia Chuntao of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a state think-tank with the status of a ministry, Mao is not an issue of political sensitivities but a �
��matter of principle’. For Xia, the Party’s discussion of the issue in the early eighties, which resolved that Mao was 70 per cent good, 30 per cent bad, settled the debate decisively. ‘Now, when we look back we can see how politically wise the conclusion was. There was a voice to deny Mao completely. Had it been done, it could have had a big negative impact on Chinese society,’ he said. ‘The story of Mao is a real-life subject. Mao lived quite close to us, so it is not easy to make up stories about him.’

  Li Rui’s party pedigree has always given him greater licence to speak out, but the authorities’ tolerance does not extend to news outlets which carry his words. In 2002, Li was interviewed by the 21st-Century World Herald in Guangzhou, at the time a bastion of relative openness in the media. Li criticized the party’s falsification of history and the absence of any independent check on its power. Worse, he called the enduring deification of Mao a ‘cult’ that was ‘evil in the extreme’, equating it with the outlawed religious sect, Falun Gong. The propaganda department did not just censure the editor of the paper for publishing Li’s comments. They closed it down altogether. The same fate awaited other editors and journalists who confronted the Party on history, even on events that long pre-dated their rise to power.

  The Party’s decision in 2001 to extend its historical remit back to 1840, well before the collapse of China’s final dynasty in 1911 and its civil war with the Nationalists in the 1930s and 1940s, enlarged the formal battlefield in the history wars. For the propaganda department, it provided extra internal leverage to discipline errant editors whom they had long been waiting to bring into line. Near the top of the blacklist for years had been Li Datong, at the China Youth Daily.

  In person, Li was very much the old-style, sleeves-rolled-up newspaper editor, someone who sounded as if he was used to giving orders and having them acted on. Impatient and to the point, each short, sharp sentence was delivered as a definitive opinion as much as a response to any question. Often, he seemed to bark rather than speak. But if he had an editor’s personality, he also had an editor’s instincts. He was tough, brave and outspoken, and constantly on the lookout for issues he could use to challenge the authorities.

  The early years of Li’s working life had been spent herding sheep on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, where he was sent for his re-education in the Cultural Revolution. He got his first job as a journalist in 1979, at the provincial office of the China Youth Daily, and gradually worked his way into a senior position in Beijing. He only just survived the post-1989 crackdown on liberal journalists, spending five years doing penance at the paper’s research institute for his support of the protests, before returning to the paper full-time. By the early years of the new century, he had risen to edit the paper’s controversial weekly supplement, Freezing Point. The China Youth Daily, with its relatively liberal culture and impeccable political standing, gave Li a lot of room for movement. The paper’s sponsor was the Communist Youth League, the party body which had been the power base of Hu Yaobang and, later, of Hu Jintao himself. It didn’t take long, however, for the political protection the paper rendered him to crumble.

  Like any Chinese journalists worth their salt, Li despised the weekly guidelines issued by the propaganda department on how to handle news. The department’s instructions varied–they would dictate the content on some issues and give broad guidance on others, depending on the issue’s sensitivity. For day-to-day events, the department dispenses directions by phone or, more recently, text message. The department’s word is final. ‘There was no debate. They would just tell you,’ said one senior editor. ‘They would never go too deeply into the reasons. Such things are not to be discussed with outsiders, for a start, but it is also because the reasons themselves are sensitive. They represent the influence exerted by all sorts of different interest groups.’ The system mainly relies on self-censorship, or, to use the Party’s parlance, ‘self-discipline’. There are no censors sitting in the newsrooms running their red pens through stories, as in the former Soviet Union. ‘Editors right down to people at the bottom of the newsroom don’t need to be told,’ the editor said. ‘There is a red line in their head.’

  Li, who had often stumbled across that red line, had put himself in the cross-hairs of the propaganda department well before he went to war over history. When the paper’s new editor-in-chief tried in 2005 to grade reporters’ work according to how it was judged by government officials–their pay would be docked by poor notices and given bonuses for good ones–Li led a revolt which killed the plan. He had also published an article about the apology offered by the leader of the Nationalists in Taiwan for the ‘White Terror’ unleashed when the party took over the island in the early fifties. The contrast with the Party’s handling of its own history of repression in China was unstated, but unmistakable. Even after publishing the Taiwan article, Li remained fixated on the topic of political education. ‘Politics lessons are all about drumming information into people’s brains about the Party, but this was too sensitive for us, so we wondered, where do we start? And we thought of history,’ Li said. Leafing through a magazine in late 2005 which had been sent to him by a friend, Li stumbled across an essay by an elderly academic that was just what he had in mind.

  Yuan Weishi, a retired professor of Chinese philosophy at Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, had had similar thoughts about political education. In 2001, he had begun to gather Chinese high school textbooks to compare how they handled the seventy-year period following the opium war to the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 with those produced in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Yuan said he was horrified. In mainland texts, constant patriotic exhortations to ‘uphold’ traditional Chinese culture and protect the country swamped any rational assessment of China’s own weaknesses. The logic of the textbooks was that Chinese culture was ‘superior and unmatched’ and that any kind of dictatorship or mob violence could be used to erase ‘outside evils’ to protect it. He described the education as akin to growing up ‘drinking the wolf’s milk’. After going through the textbooks, Yuan said, ‘I was stunned to find our youth are continuing to drink this wolf’s milk today!’

  Yuan focused on the textbook’s handling of the Boxer rebellion in 1899–1900, an event that ended in humiliation for the Qing court when the siege of the old legation quarter in Beijing was eventually lifted by foreign armies. The Boxers were Taliban-like bands of peasants, known for their elaborate, superstitious martial arts rituals, which they believed made them immune to bullets, and their visceral hatred of foreign intruders into China. The mainland textbooks, Yuan said, had rightly chronicled the overseas armies’ murders and looting in victory, but had ignored the Boxers’ indiscriminate violence against foreigners in return. ‘The Boxers cut down telegraph lines, destroyed schools, demolished railway tracks, burned foreign merchandise, murdered foreigners and any Chinese with connections to them,’ Yuan wrote. ‘Any person or thing with a foreign flavour had to be totally annihilated…yet our children’s textbooks will not speak about it!’

  Yuan’s article was published in a small-circulation, underground journal in southern China in 2002. It had little impact and sank without trace, until someone sent Li Datong a copy at the end of 2005. Reading it he was thrilled and promptly reprinted the article in full in Freezing Point in early 2006, nearly four years after its initial publication. He knew he was taking a risk, but overrode opposition within the paper. ‘[My colleagues] collectively thought we should not publish this article, as this would become a challenge to the power of the Party,’ he said. At most, Li expected a slap on the wrist from the reading-and-evaluation team of retired cadres who pored over the paper for the propaganda department. He pointed out that CCTV, the state broadcaster at the heart of the media establishment, had just run a forty-episode series based on a wholesale reinterpretation of the late Qing dynasty. That programme had been reviewed by historians, and then gone all the way to Hu Jintao for a ruling, before being approved. Yuan’s article, Li said, was about events a century ago as well, whe
n ‘China had no Marxism, no socialism and no Communist Party’.

  Unbeknown to Li, the propaganda department was already lying in wait for him. The chief editors of the China Youth Daily had been called into the youth league headquarters a few weeks earlier and told ‘that pressure from higher up about Freezing Point was becoming too much to bear’. Yuan’s article was just the excuse that the paper’s assembled enemies were looking for. The essay was subject to a flurry of attacks in cyberspace. Yuan himself was personally targeted as a ‘traitor’ for ‘subverting’ modern history education. ‘The Politburo had already decided to deal with us,’ said Li. ‘Previously, the propaganda department had monitored the reactions of the netizens to our articles. When there was applause around, they did not do anything, because they were afraid of angering too many people. But when the reaction was bad, they felt the time had come.’ A few days after the essay appeared, Freezing Point was suspended.

  Li went down screaming, determined, he said, ‘to leave a mark of protest in history’. He wrote an open letter challenging the decision and launched a protest through party channels, saying the order to close the paper was ‘illegal’. ‘We didn’t want to be like the last generation of news workers who were the obedient tools and “mouths and tongues” of the Party,’ he said. ‘All the media organizations were accomplices in a series of disasters in history, such as the anti-rightist movement, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.’ Li’s letter only angered the propaganda department even further. Two weeks later he was formally sacked and assigned back to the newspaper research institute, where he had spent five years after 1989. ‘It was my second trip to the “warehouse”,’ he joked, as he strode around his apartment on the outskirts of Beijing, riffling through his files for information. In a final, quixotic gesture, Li and a longtime colleague removed with him issued a lengthy open letter raging against the crushing of the paper. ‘State officials can set fires but civilians are not allowed to light a lantern!’ they wrote. ‘Their brains have no hint of any notion of civil rights.’